Abstract
In this chapter, Gust builds on the Introduction of his book to address the risqué narrative tradition known as the fabliaux. Many of Chaucer’s most suggestive sexual scenarios are found in his fabliaux—The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale, and The Shipman’s Tale—and these stories frequently contain distinct pornographic elements. These texts are therefore offered as excellent test cases for Gust’s theory of Chaucerotics and for understanding the diverse vision of medieval eroticism found in The Canterbury Tales. The chapter presents a fresh historical and theoretical account of these bawdy fabliaux and introduces the idea of the “cloak of language” to analyze with subtlety the evocative, titillating sexual language used by Chaucer in his fabliaux and Troilus and Criseyde.
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Notes
- 1.
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, III.28, 46, 62, 150.
- 2.
The Wife of Bath’s Tale, III.886–888.
- 3.
This oft-cited conceptualization is located in Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux: études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du moyen âge (Paris: Bouillon, 1893), p. 37.
- 4.
This particular characterization is my own, but in his comprehensive overview of fabliaux scholarship Brian Levy offers a useful account of the genre itself; see the Introduction to The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 26–27 [1–29]. Earlier, Mary Jane Stearns Schenck offered her own helpful overview of the genre and its definition by critics past and present; cf. the first chapter in The Fabliaux: Tales of Wit and Deception (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1987). Most notable about Schenck’s study is her structural approach and definition, which underlines her belief that critics of these tales have too often hesitated “to accept fabliaux as didactic” (p. 22). Schenck thus takes an atypically moral perspective, claiming that “A fabliau is a brief narrative poem with a tripartite macrostructure whose narrative is a humorous, even ribald, story arranged to teach a lesson” (p. 36).
- 5.
Cf. Norris J. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), p. 14.
- 6.
Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study of Style and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 59.
- 7.
Charles Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986), pp. 73, 76, 79.
- 8.
See Holly Crocker’s Introduction to Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux, ed. Holly A.Crocker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 1 [1–14].
- 9.
See A. C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 17.
- 10.
See Goldberg, “John Skathelok’s Dick,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, p. 114.
- 11.
See Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, p. 16.
- 12.
See Goldberg, “John Skathelok’s Dick,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, p. 115.
- 13.
On these points, I again draw from Goldberg, “John Skathelok’s Dick,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, pp. 116, 122.
- 14.
See Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, p. 20.
- 15.
On these points, see Stewart, “Pornography, Obscenity, and Capitalism,” pp. 391, 395.
- 16.
Williams, Hard Core, p. 36.
- 17.
See Williams, Hard Core, p. 121.
- 18.
Mark Cruse, “Matter and Meaning in Medieval Books: The Romance Manuscript as Sensory Experience,” The Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 46 [45–56].
- 19.
On these points, see Cruse, “Matter and Meaning in Medieval Books,” pp. 50, 51, 54.
- 20.
Evelyn Birge Vitz, “Erotic Reading in the Middle Ages: Performance and Re-Performance of Romance,” in Performing Medieval Narrative, ed. Marilyn Lawrence, Nancy Regalado, and Evelyn Birge Vitz (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer), p. 73. For Vitz, these “erotogenic” romances may be seen as akin to soft porn in that they are “sexually stimulating” but in this case not “obscene or hard-edged” (p. 73).
- 21.
See Cruse, “Matter and Meaning in Medieval Books,” p. 54.
- 22.
See Vitz, “Erotic Reading in the Middle Ages,” pp. 73, 88. Vitz calls this phenomenon “erotic reading” and cites several examples from literary sources where we see a couple reading romance material together, and their reading of the story “inspires them to make love on the spot” in imitation of what they have read (p. 74).
- 23.
V. A. Kolve thus asserts that, while we cannot know Chaucer’s audience exactly, he “was a writer, as most portraits of him implicitly remind us in showing a pen-case attached to his gown. He thought poetry the key of remembrance, our most vivid and authentic record of the past, and he wanted us to read him, to open ourselves to the progress of his narratives in ways that are uniquely the privilege of readers, just as he himself had done with The Romance of the Rose” and other works; see Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 12. This trend toward private reading would, naturally, become even more widespread with the development of the printing press, which immediately meant that “the private circulation of manuscripts now competed with the less regulated public marketplace of printed goods,” as Findlen explains in “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Hunt, p. 54.
- 24.
Saenger, “Silent Reading,” p. 384.
- 25.
Saenger, “Silent Reading,” pp. 390, 391.
- 26.
Coleman does not dispute the shift from mostly oral reading to primarily private textual interactions, but takes care to stress that this was a lengthy and complicated transition. In her well-known study Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Coleman raises questions about some of Saenger’s points and states that “public reading survived well past the announced date of its obsolescence” and that “The slow growth over the fourteenth through the late fifteenth century of a more individualized, less synthetic mentality was, no doubt, related to the slowly escalating habit of private reading; but the result for this crucial period was a growing sophistication of both private and public reading.” Thus, she prefers to discuss late medieval “aurality,” a “state of acute mixedness” that combined in various ways the traditionally opposed poles of orality/literacy (pp. xiii, 2, 27).
- 27.
Saenger, “Silent Reading,” pp. 399, 401, 411, 412.
- 28.
Saenger, “Silent Reading,” pp. 412, 413.
- 29.
Taylor, “Reading the Dirty Bits,” in Desire and Discipline, ed. Murray and Eisenbichler, p. 284. The manuscript to which Taylor refers in this passage is known as the Osborn Confessio Amantis, now held in the Beinecke Library at Yale.
- 30.
Taylor, “Reading the Dirty Bits,” in Desire and Discipline, ed. Murray and Eisenbichler, p. 286. I have corrected type-os in the original passage.
- 31.
Moulton, Before Pornography, p. 38. Moulton later adds that the “coterie circulation of texts—a social activity that embodied and established networks and friendship and patronage—was also, at times, conceived of as a flirtatious, erotic activity” (p. 69).
- 32.
See Findlen, “Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Hunt, p. 58.
- 33.
Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 5, 17.
- 34.
Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, p. 19.
- 35.
Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, pp. 20, 31.
- 36.
I draw these ideas about the quinque lineae amoris from Don Monson’s recent study of Andreas Capellanus, Scholasticism, and the Courtly Tradition (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), pp. 193, 310. The five stages of love are: visus (sight), alloquium (conversation), contactus (physical contact), oscula (kissing), and factum (the deed of copulation).
- 37.
Monson discusses this reference in Andreas Capellanus, Scholasticism, and the Courtly Tradition, p. 206. He borrows Walsh’s translation of the original Latin, which reads as follows: “Nam quum aliquid videt aliquam aptam amori et suo formata arbitrio, statim eam incipit concupiscere corde.”
- 38.
I have taken these concise characterizations from Robert Sturges’ account of “Visual Pleasure and La Vita nuova: Lacan, Mulvey, and Dante,” The Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 97, 98 [93–105].
- 39.
See Taylor, “Reading the Dirty Bits,” in Desire and Discipline, ed. Murray and Eisenbichler, p. 288.
- 40.
See Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, pp. 6, 7.
- 41.
I draw here upon two brief articles written by Richard Newhauser for a special edition of The Senses and Society: “Foreword: The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Intellectual History,” The Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 6 [5–9]; and also “Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses,” The Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 34 [28–44].
- 42.
See Newhauser, “Peter of Limoges, Optics, and the Science of the Senses,” p. 39.
- 43.
The descriptions of, and quotations from, Equicola’s De natura d’amore are borrowed from Ian Moulton’s “In Praise of Touch: Mario Equicola and the Nature of Love,” The Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 120, 125 [119–130].
- 44.
See Moulton, “In Praise of Touch,” 126.
- 45.
Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England, pp. 5–6.
- 46.
A.C. Spearing, “The Medieval Poet as Voyeur,” in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 62, 72 [57–86].
- 47.
Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, p. 22.
- 48.
Hines, The Fabliau in English, p. 23.
- 49.
Cf. Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux, p. 55.
- 50.
Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, pp. 197–198. It is worth noting that Muscatine is specifically discussing Chaucerian fabliaux in this passage, but his observations can be more broadly applied and in fact he says virtually the same thing in general about the fabliaux tradition in The Old French Fabliaux, p. 69.
- 51.
Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux, p. 59.
- 52.
I draw here on Crocker, “Introduction,” Comic Provocations, ed. Crocker, pp. 1, 2.
- 53.
See Bloch, “Modest Maids and Modified Nouns,” pp. 297–298. Bloch also offers related comments in his book The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 63.
- 54.
Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature, p. 239.
- 55.
John Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France Around 1200 (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 41.
- 56.
The comments in this paragraph are taken from Laura Kipnis’ important article “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler,” in Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 223, 224 [219–241].
- 57.
For example, in her influential study Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Penguin Books, 1989; first published in 1979) Andrea Dworkin characterizes pornography as “the graphic depiction of women as vile whores” and argues that “the debasing of women depicted in pornography and intrinsic to it is objective and real in that women are so debased” (pp. 200, 201).
- 58.
E. Jane Burns, “This Prick which is not One: How Women Talk Back in Old French Fabliaux,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 188 [188–212].
- 59.
Lesley Johnson, “Women on Top: Antifeminism in the Fabliaux?,” Modern Language Review 78.2 (1983): 299 [298–307].
- 60.
Holly Crocker, “Disfiguring Gender: Masculine Desire in the Old French Fabliau,” Exemplaria 23.4 (2011): 350 [342–367].
- 61.
Johnson, “Women on Top,” pp. 300, 303.
- 62.
See Crocker, “Disfiguring Gender,” p. 363.
- 63.
Eve Salisbury, “Troubling Gender and Genre in the Trials and Joys of Marriage,” Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 11.1 (2003): 71–91. Please note that my copy of this essay is mysteriously devoid of the appropriate page numbers, but I have taken this quote from page two of my pdf. file.
- 64.
Salisbury, “Troubling Gender.”
- 65.
Kathleen Lubey, “Spectacular Sex: Thought and Pleasure in the Encounter with Pornography,” Differences 17.2 (2006): 115, 118 [113–131].
- 66.
Lubey, “Spectacular Sex,” 126, 127.
- 67.
Kipnis, “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust,” 224–225, 226–227.
- 68.
Mark Jancovich’s words are taken from his article “Naked Ambitions: Pornography, Taste, and the Problem of the Middlebrow,” which was purblished in June 2001 in the online media studies journal Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, June 2001.
- 69.
Christopher Morris, “Derrida on Pornography: Putting (it) Up for Sale,” Derrida Today 6.1 (2013): 110 [97–114].
- 70.
On these points, see Frances Ferguson, “Pornography: The Theory,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 680, 690 [670–695].
- 71.
Morris, “Derrida on Pornography,” p. 102.
- 72.
Baldwin, The Language of Sex, p. 113.
- 73.
Baldwin, The Language of Sex, pp. 110, 111.
- 74.
Baldwin, The Language of Sex, p. 159.
- 75.
Bloch, “Modest Maids and Modified Nouns,” in Obscenity, ed. Ziolkowski, pp. 295, 296.
- 76.
Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, p. 87.
- 77.
Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, p. 109.
- 78.
See Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux, pp. 90, 91.
- 79.
As Wagner explains, it may be that to read such oral verse privately “reduces these erotica to essentially humorous writings” and “drains them of the value achieved through public recital”; see Eros Revived, p. 200.
- 80.
Gaunt, “Obscene Hermeneutics in Troubadour Lyric,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. McDonald, pp. 94, 95.
- 81.
References taken from Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary-Tradition, ed. A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 152. I have marked off the philosopher’s name in this section because it remains uncertain whether Bernard Silvester truly wrote the commentary on the Aeneid from which these passages are drawn. For further discussion of the concepts of integumentum and involucrum, consult Winthrop Wetherbee’s introduction to his translation of The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); see also Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 42–58.
- 82.
For example, in The General Prologue, the narrator says of the Prioress that “Ful fetys was hir cloke, as I was war” (I.157), and in The Knight’s Tale the description of Mars’ temple includes reference to “The smylere with the knyf under the cloke” (I.2000). More interesting for the purposes of my study is that Chaucer uses the term shortly before the consummation scene in Book III of Troilus and Criseyde, when Pandarus says to Troilus “Artow agast so that she wol the bite?/ Wy! Don this furred cloke upon thy sherte,/ And folwe me, for I wol have the wite.” (III.737–739)
- 83.
See Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Minnis and Scott, p. 152. I also discuss this particular commentary in my overview of medieval “masking” (via the persona) in the introduction to my book Constructing Chaucer: Author and Authority in the Critical Tradition.
- 84.
The opposing view of language is known as “mould theory,” which is frequently offered in support of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Briefly, mould theory posits the idea that language serves as a kind of mold into which categories of thought are cast and shaped.
- 85.
For additional, basic details, see Oxford Reference online.
- 86.
Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), p. 173.
- 87.
Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, pp. 23, 107, 124.
- 88.
Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo, reprint, trans. Mary Dalwood (New York: Arno Press, 1977), pp. 107, 211. On the concept of the rogue, Jacques Derrida’s fascinating study on the topic deserves mention: Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford U Press, 2005).
- 89.
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Difference ‘it’ Makes: Gender and Desire in the Miller’s Tale,” ELH 61.3 (1994): 481, 482 [473–499]. In making these observations, Leicester is drawing on the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
- 90.
Leicester, Jr., “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism,” p. 496.
- 91.
Leicester, Jr., “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism,” p. 483. I have eliminated Leicester’s use of italics in this passage.
- 92.
I cite from the version of “The Signification of the Phallus,” published in Écrits: Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), pp. 281–291 [284, 285].
- 93.
Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” pp. 285, 287.
- 94.
Leicester, Jr., “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism,” p. 477. In this passage, Leicester is, in fact, working with Lacan’s influential ideas of the unconscious.
- 95.
See Kipnis, “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust,” p. 229.
- 96.
Morris, “Derrida on Pornography,” p. 102.
- 97.
Lubey, “Spectacular Sex,” pp. 115, 126.
- 98.
Lubey, “Spectacular Sex,” p. 127.
- 99.
Michelson, Speaking the Unspeakable, p. 48.
- 100.
See Alan Soble, The Philosophy of Sex and Love: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2008), p. 62.
- 101.
Williams, Hard Core, p. 74.
- 102.
See Amanda Hopkins, “‘Wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain,” in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Hopkins and James, p. 69 [53–70].
- 103.
Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, p. 29.
- 104.
See Roy J. Pearcy, “Modes of Signification and the Humor of Obscene Diction in the Fabliaux,” in The Humor of the Fabliaux: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas D. Cooke and Benjamin Honeycutt (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), p. 175 [163–196].
- 105.
Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” p. 288.
- 106.
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 21, 33, 116, 230.
- 107.
I have drawn these particular conceptual variants, respectively, from Hoff, “Why Is There No History of Pornography?,” p. 33; and Gubar, “Representing Pornography,” p. 58.
- 108.
Alexandre Leupin, Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality, trans. Kate M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), pp. 119, 225.
- 109.
I draw here from Lucienne Frappier-Mazur’s essay “Truth and the Obscene Word in Eighteenth-Century French Pornography,” in The Invention of Pornography, ed. Hunt, pp. 211, 219.
- 110.
These passages are taken from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 10, 14, 17, 23, 27, 44, 65.
- 111.
Roy J. Pearcy, “The Genre of Chaucer’s Fabliau-Tales,” in Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction, ed. Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester, MI: Solaris Press, Inc., 1986), pp. 330, 335 [329–384]. For Pearcy, it is in their comedy that Chaucer has especially altered these tales and rendered them divergent from the traditions of fabliaux (and, thus, perhaps he is even drawing more extensively than scholars acknowledge from other comedic genres and traditions).
- 112.
See Lacy, Reading Fabliaux, pp. 15–17. As Mary Jane Schenck points out, the French generic term “fablel” was sometimes applied to these stories in medieval sources; see her discussion of this term and its moral suggestions in The Fabliaux: Tales of Wit and Deception, pp. 1–4. Despite this uncommon usage, it is clear that “fabliaux” (like “porn”) is characteristically a post-medieval generic designation, as Schenck herself acknowledges by stating that “From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the word fabliau has been used loosely to refer to any slightly ribald tale” (p. x).
- 113.
Thomas D. Cooke, “Pornography, the Comic Spirit, and the Fabliaux,” in The Humor of the Fabliaux, ed. Cooke and Honeycutt, pp. 137, 146 [137–162].
- 114.
Lara Farina, Erotic Disciourse and Early English Religious Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 3.
- 115.
Hugh Magennis, “‘No Sex Please, We’re Anglo-Saxons’? Attitudes to Sexuality in Old English Prose and Poetry,” Leeds Studies in English 26 (1995): 1, 5, 9 [1–27].
- 116.
Magennis, “‘No Sex Please, We’re Anglo-Saxons’,” p. 12.
- 117.
Claire Lees, “Engendering Religious Desire: Sex, Knowledge, and Christian Identity in Anglo-Saxon England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.1 (1997): 18 [17–47].
- 118.
Lees, “Engendering Religious Desire,” pp. 19, 23, 39.
- 119.
Lees, “Engendering Religious Desire,” p. 39.
- 120.
On these points, see Magennis, “‘No Sex Please, We’re Anglo-Saxons’,” pp. 16, 17, 18.
- 121.
See Foxon, Libertine Literature in England, p. 46.
- 122.
See Hines, The Fabliau in English, p. 250.
- 123.
See Wagner, Eros Revived, p. 203.
- 124.
On these points, see Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” in For Adult Users Only, ed. Gubar and Hoff, pp. 54, 58, 64 [47–67].
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Gust, G.W. (2018). Chaucerotics and the Cloak of Language in the Fabliaux. In: Chaucerotics. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89746-2_2
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